Legions of Rome

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  Over the winter, Antioch and many cities of the region were hit by a severe earthquake. The Syrian capital was badly damaged, and “multitudes” killed. [Dio, lxviii, 25] Among the casualties were foreign ambassadors waiting on the Roman emperor, and Marcus Vergilianus Pedo, who had just arrived in Syria after briefly serving as a consul in Rome and giving his name to the year. Trajan himself managed to escape with minor injuries, via a window of his quarters, being led from the ruins by men “of greater than human stature”; Dio was possibly referring to large Germans of the emperor’s Singularian Horse bodyguard. [Ibid.] For some days, Trajan lived in a tent in the Antioch chariot-racing stadium, the hippodrome, as aftershocks continued to shake the region.

  The spring of AD 115 saw Trajan back with the army in Mesopotamia, and again on the advance. The six legions of the task force moved east through a landscape “destitute of trees.” A convoy of wagons had brought the newly constructed fleet of collapsible boats down from Nisibis, but as Trajan tried to send his troops across a river in his path—probably the Nighr—an opposition force that had assembled on the far bank made life difficult for the invaders by peppering them with missiles. [Ibid.]

  This was the first mention in Cassius Dio’s narrative of the campaign of organized resistance in the field. It turned out that Trajan’s invasion had taken place at an opportune time, for “the Parthian power had been destroyed by civil conflicts and was still at this time the subject of strife.” [Dio, LXVIII, 22] The Parthians were locked in a civil war. It is likely that the troops who opposed Trajan at this river crossing comprised the small army of the kingdom of Adiabene, a Parthian ally in northern Mesopotamia.

  After assembling their vessels, Trajan’s legions began to build a bridge of moored boats across the river. In the usual Roman textbook fashion, there were several craft at the forefront of this growing bridge, equipped with towers and screens, and manned by archers and heavy infantry with javelins who rained missiles down on the enemy. At the same time, various Roman units dashed this way and that, up and down the western bank of the river, giving the impression that they were going to cross in boats at various points. This forced the outnumbered enemy to divert detachments from their army to hurry up and down the bank in order to be in position to counter these crossings. With the main enemy defense weakened, Trajan was able to send his troops across the bridge of boats in force.

  There was a brief battle on the eastern side of the river, but Trajan had overwhelming numbers—his army would have comprised 60,000–70,000 fighting men at the commencement of the offensive the previous year. “The barbarians gave way,” said Dio. [Dio, LXVIII, 21] Once across the river, the Roman army quickly gained possession of the kingdom of Adiabene.

  To Trajan, this was a special moment. Like so many Roman generals including Julius Caesar, Trajan had a desire to emulate the deeds of Alexander the Great. Alexander had brought his army here to Adiabene. [Ibid.] And it was here, on the plain in the vicinity of the ancient cities of Nineveh, Arbela and Gaugamela, that the Macedonian army had defeated King Darius’ Persian army in 331 BC.

  Further to the south, at Adenystrae, modern-day Irbil, 70 miles (112 kilometers) north of Kirkuk in today’s northern Iraq, there was a strong Parthian fort. When Trajan sent a legion centurion named Sentius ahead to give the Adenystrae garrison a chance to surrender, the Parthian commander, Mebarsapes, rejected the offer and imprisoned the centurion. In the Adenystrae dungeon, Sentius convinced other prisoners to help him. The centurion duly escaped, found Mebarsapes, then killed him, and opened the fort gate as the Roman army approached. Centurion Sentius’ rewards from a grateful Trajan can only be imagined.

  As the Roman army continued its advance down the Euphrates, “quite free from molestation” from the enemy and apparently using the collapsible boats to transport its supplies, Trajan conceived the idea of building a canal between the Euphrates and the Tigris. [Dio, LXVIII, 26, 28] This was to allow him to follow the Tigris all the way to the Persian Gulf, or the Erythreaean Sea as the Romans called it. The courses of the two rivers come tantalizingly close near where the later city of Baghdad would rise, but Trajan’s engineers warned him that his canal was not practical because the Euphrates flowed at a higher elevation than the Tigris, and a canal would only run the Euphrates dry. The determined emperor therefore had his troops drag the boats overland to the Tigris.

  On the eastern bank of the Tigris, the legions came to Parthia’s winter capital, Ctesiphon. Its Parthian defenders put up some resistance, but the legions soon captured it, and, apparently, also captured neighboring Seleucia. At an assembly in Ctesiphon, Trajan was hailed imperator by the legions. It seems that Trajan and the bulk of his army spent the winter of AD 115–116 there at Ctesiphon, with Trajan occupying the palace of the kings of Parthia. From there, Trajan sent his latest dispatches to the Senate at Rome. Following the AD 114 campaign, the Senate had granted Trajan the title Optimus, meaning “Most Excellent.” When news of the emperor’s latest successes in the East arrived, especially the taking of the Parthian capital, the Senate granted him the additional title of “Parthicus.”

  In the spring of AD 116, Trajan and part of his army sailed down the Tigris in his fleet of boats, almost coming to grief when, on reaching a point in the river’s lower reaches where the current met the incoming tide, a storm broke over the vessels. The Romans took refuge on an island in the river, Mesene, whose ruler treated Trajan kindly. Trajan continued on to the Persian Gulf. There, on seeing a ship departing for India, reminding him that Alexander the Great had marched that far, Trajan is reported to have said: “I would certainly have crossed over to the Indi, too, if I were still young.” [Ibid., 29]

  The Romans then retraced their course up the Tigris. Whether on water against the current, or on land, this return progress would have been slower than the exhilarating trip down the river to the Gulf. Trajan deliberately paused at the ancient ruins of Babylon, 55 miles (88 kilometers) south of today’s Baghdad. Babylon’s original culture had been more than 1,500 years old when Alexander the Great died here during his great eastern campaign of conquest. At Babylon, Trajan was shown the room where Alexander had reputedly breathed his last, and there he conducted a religious sacrifice in memory of the great Macedonian king.

  As he lingered at Babylon, Trajan received unsettling news. While he had been playing tourist and sailing down to the Gulf and returning again, “all the conquered districts were thrown into turmoil and revolted, and the garrisons placed among the various peoples were either expelled or slain.” [Ibid.] Nisibis and Edessa were among the cities that had revolted, as had Seleucia, only a comparatively short distance from Babylon. In response, Trajan quickly sent his best generals, Quietus the Moor and Maximus, hurrying north with flying columns, and dispatched a force under legion commanders Ericius Clarens and Julius Alexander to retake Seleucia, a city with a population of as many as 600,000 people.

  Maximus’ troops were engaged in battle in the field by the Parthians. The Romans were defeated, the loyal Maximus slaughtered in the fighting. Lusius Quietus made up for Maximus’ failure by recovering several key cities including Nisibis and storming a stubbornly defended Edessa, which his troops sacked and left in flames. Seleucia was also recaptured, by Clarens and Alexander, and it too was put to the torch after being sacked, although it appears not to have been totally destroyed.

  Trajan himself returned to Ctesiphon, the Parthian capital, and on the plain outside the city he called an assembly of his troops and of all Parthians in the vicinity. Trajan, after mounting a lofty platform in front of the assembly, told his audience of all he had achieved in this war, and announced that he had chosen a new king of Parthia—it would be, he said, Parthamaspates, a Parthian prince, whom he now produced and crowned king.

  Parthamaspates was left at Ctesiphon to rule over the Parthians while vowing fealty to Trajan and Rome. Trajan, in the meantime, led his troops north to Hatra, a little west of the Tigris, where the Atreni Arab residents had also revolted
and closed their gates to Romans. The city of Hatra was not large, and it sat on the edge of the desert with little water and no trees in the vicinity. But these very qualities made it difficult to besiege. Trajan had a camp built, and surrounded the city, then sent his legionaries against its walls with mining equipment.

  Before long, the troops had created a breach by causing a section of Hatra’s wall to topple. Trajan, commanding the assault from the saddle and keeping close to the action, immediately sent cavalry to force their way through the breach. But the Atreni counter-attacked so fiercely that they drove the Roman cavalry back into their own camp. So that he would not be recognized by enemy archers, Trajan had removed his purple commander-in-chief’s cloak and other imperial trappings, but now, as his troopers came flooding back in disarray, the pursuing Hatran archers, “seeing his majestic gray head and his august countenance, suspected his identity” and let off a volley of arrows in his direction. Trajan himself escaped unhurt, but one of the cavalrymen of his bodyguard was killed in the deluge of arrows. [Ibid., 31]

  As the siege of Hatra dragged on, the Roman besiegers were sometimes drenched with rain and pelted by hail, while at other times they endured fierce heat and were plagued by flies that settled in masses on their food and drink. With the siege making no progress, the morale of his troops drooping and the campaigning season nearing its end, Trajan gave up his attempt to take Hatra, and ordered his troops to pack up and pull out. As the army marched north, Trajan began to feel increasingly unwell.

  The year had seen the legions and auxiliary units involved in the campaign suffer heavy casualties. With supplies low, Trajan, now sick and exhausted, withdrew his forces from Mesopotamia. Leaving his army in Armenia and Cappadocia for the winter, he returned to Antioch, where he rejoined his wife and nephew, who had been supervising the metropolitan rebuilding efforts in the wake of the earlier earthquake.

  Early the following year, AD 117, at Antioch, Trajan was making plans for a new spring offensive in Mesopotamia when he was struck down by a serious stroke which left him paralyzed down one side. As he struggled to recover, the emperor put his Parthian plans on hold. And then, in the spring, news reached Antioch that there had been Jewish uprisings around the eastern Mediterranean. In Cyrenaica in North Africa, a reported 220,000 Romans and Greeks living in the province had been killed. In Egypt, more civilians died, and on Cyprus 240,000 people were said to have perished at the hands of the Jewish rebels. [Ibid., 32]

  Now, all thoughts of resumed operations in Mesopotamia were forgotten as Trajan set out to eliminate the Jewish problem. The Jews of Judea, however, had not risen with their compatriots elsewhere in the East, so to ensure that Judea remained secure Trajan detached the 6th Ferrata Legion from his army and stationed it at Caparcotna in Galilee, just 15 miles (24 kilometers) from Nazareth, in the heart of Jewish territory.

  Simultaneously, Trajan gave Lusius Quietus, fleet prefect Turbo and his other senior commanders orders to take more troops from his army and put down the Jewish rebellions elsewhere. Units quickly set off for Egypt and Cyrenaica to the south, and, by sea, for Cyprus to the west. Meanwhile, to consolidate the Roman hold on Armenia, Trajan sent the 16th Flavia Legion to the city of Samosata, in southwestern Armenia, to establish a new base there, with the 15th Apollinaris Legion making the 16th Flavia’s former base at Satala its new home.

  In the summer of AD 117, Roman troops swept into Egypt and Cyrenaica to terminate the revolts, and triremes of Turbo’s Misene Fleet glided into harbors at Cyprus and disgorged thousands of troops. Under the leadership of Quietus and his colleagues, Roman soldiers who had so recently been fighting a grueling war in Armenia and Parthia swiftly and brutally put down all the Jewish uprisings. Those Jews on Cyprus not killed in the Roman reprisals would have been taken away as prisoners, for the island was cleared of Jews, who were from that time forward banned from even setting foot on Cyprus. [Ibid.]

  By the middle of the summer, with his poor health sorely affecting him, Trajan decided, or was convinced by those around him, to go home to Rome. In late July, he set sail for Italy with Plotina, leaving Hadrian at Antioch still in charge of Syria. Tracing the Turkish coast, the emperor’s flotilla put in at Selinus in the province of Cilicia, today’s Anatolia region in southern Turkey. There in early August AD 117, shortly after his arrival, Trajan apparently suffered another stroke, and died.

  So it was that after almost twenty years on the throne, and with his Parthian expedition up in the air, Trajan left the scene. In a letter signed by his wife but supposedly from Trajan, 41-year-old Hadrian was named as his heir. As a result, Hadrian was proclaimed the new emperor of Rome by the legions in the East, and this was subsequently endorsed by the Senate.

  In the end, apart from glory for Trajan and booty aplenty for those of his troops who survived the campaign, Trajan’s Parthian War achieved nothing, at considerable cost. Many thousands of legionaries and auxiliaries perished in the campaign, and, while numerous cities and towns had been briefly occupied or destroyed, no new territory or sources of income had been acquired by Rome.

  The Parthians, meanwhile, rejected and ejected Trajan’s choice for king, Parthamaspates, and appointed a new ruler of their own choice. As for the balance of power in the region, it was left unchanged. The Euphrates continued to serve as the boundary between the Roman world and the Parthian world. And the Parthians rebuilt their power in the region, to the extent that they would be in a position to invade Syria before half a century had passed.

  Hadrian set off for Italy, making a leisurely perambulation through the eastern provinces. By the summer of AD 118 he had arrived in Rome. With no intention of following in Trajan’s expansionist footsteps, Hadrian officially terminated the campaign in the East and sent the 1st Adiutrix Legion back to its longtime Danube base in Moesia. Hadrian’s self-appointed task from this point on would be consolidation of the frontier throughout the empire.

  Before the year was out, several of Trajan’s leading advisers and generals were arrested on what were probably trumped-up charges of conspiracy against Hadrian, and executed. Among the generals who perished in this pogrom were Palma, who had annexed Arabia Petraea for Trajan, and Quietus, the Moor who had proved to be Trajan’s most reliable and effective field commander in Dacia and the East.

  As Hadrian removed Trajan men from power and put his own stamp on the Palatium, even Trajan’s brilliant but arrogant architect Apollodorus of Damascus was sidelined, and eventually executed, by the new emperor. Hadrian went as far as removing the superstructure of Apollodorus’ famed bridge over the Danube, leaving just the massive piers standing. Hadrian’s excuse for this act was a fear of barbarian invaders using the bridge to cross the river into Roman territory. Some writers have suggested he may merely have been so jealous of Apollodorus he wanted to destroy one of the greatest monuments to his genius.

  Under Hadrian, Rome now moved from the financially unsustainable offensive stance taken by Trajan in both the West and the East, to one of defense. From this time on, the Roman Empire would be forever on the defensive.

  AD 122

  XLVI. DISAPPEARANCE OF THE 9TH

  Solving the mystery

  Sometime after AD 120, the 9th Hispana Legion disappeared from the face of the earth, with no explanation in any classical text or on any inscription. Later historians came to believe that the legion, whose last known posting was northern Britain, had been wiped out by Caledonian tribes in Scotland in AD 122, with the disaster being hushed up by Roman authorities. This was, at least, the theory.

  A popular British children’s novel of 1954, Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of the Ninth, was based on the scenario that the 9th Hispana was wiped out in “Pictland” in AD 117. No Roman writer identified tribes in Scotland as “Picts” (painted ones) until the end of the third century, and the term Pictland was not used until several centuries later, but the basic premise of a legion being wiped out in Scotland, with a legionary’s son embarking on a quest to determine what fate befe
ll his father, a soldier of the 9th Hispana Legion, made for a bestseller and a widely viewed television series.

  This popularity may have been unsettling for academics, and before long a counter-theory took hold in academic circles—that the 9th Hispana had actually been wiped out a decade later in Judea, during the Second Jewish Revolt of AD 132–135. Yet, there was absolutely no proof to support this latter theory other than the fact that Roman historian Cassius Dio had written that “many Romans, moreover, perished in this war.” [Dio, LXIX, 14]

  Several other writers have suggested that the 9th Hispana was the legion which Dio describes being wiped out by the Parthians at Elegeia in Armenia in AD 161, at the beginning of the reign of Marcus Aurelius. But the legion involved on that occasion is much more likely to have been the 22nd Deiotariana, which was based in the East throughout its career. AD 161 was, after all, four decades after the last known reference to the 9th Hispana.

  The theory of the 9th Hispana’s annihilation in Judea sometime between AD 132 and 135 came to hold sway in academic circles even though there was no record of the legion leaving Britain, of it being stationed in the East, or of it even being in existence during that decade between AD 122 and 132. The evidence does point to the two legions stationed in Judea in AD 132, the 10th Fretensis and the 6th Ferrata being severely mauled during the revolt, but no classical source states that a legion was totally destroyed in Judea.